The following abbreviations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to in the following description associated with the prior art and the present invention.
ARPAddress Resolution ProtocolCLICommand Line InterfaceCPUCentral Processing UnitECMPEqual Cost Multi-PathIPInternet ProtocolLPMLowest Prefix MatchMACMedia Access ControlNINetwork Interface CardSASource AddressTTLTime to LiveVLANVirtual Local Area Network
It would be desirable to have a switch that can receive a unicast packet (which has a router MAC address) in a first VLAN and then multicast/flood copies of that packet from a second VLAN. The ability to multicast a unicast packet (e.g., traffic, data stream) in this manner would be desirable in a wide variety of applications including, for example, server farms and redundant firewalls. In the first case, it would be desirable if a user can have their switch multicast the received unicast packet to multiple servers because each of the servers need to receive a redundant backup of the unicast packet. In the second case, it would be desirable if a user can have their switch multicast the received unicast packet to redundant firewalls because each of the firewalls need to receive the same packets so that they can provide the necessary redundancy.
The traditional switches cannot receive unicast packets at one VLAN and then multicast the packets at a second VLAN because: (1) the packet is routed; (2) the packet does not have a broadcast MAC address as the destination MAC address; (3) the packet does not have a multicast MAC address as the destination MAC address; and (4) the packet does not have a multicast IP address as the destination IP address. Accordingly, there has been and is a need to address this particular shortcoming and other shortcomings which are associated with the traditional switches. This need and other needs are satisfied by the present invention.